


Young and Naive Still

by VerboseWordsmith



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Jaegercon, Kid Fic, Pre-Canon, Stacker despairs for the future (kinda), Team Hot Dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 17:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerboseWordsmith/pseuds/VerboseWordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako and Chuck's first meeting doesn't go very well. It's fair to say it goes rather badly, actually. Chuck's a jerk, Mako wants to punch him and Herc's just amazed it hasn't ended in tears or grievous bodily harm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Young and Naive Still

**Author's Note:**

> The other night I realized that Chuck and Mako had to have met as kids and there needs be fic about that. Related: there needs to be an au where Mako and Chuck are Drift-compatible and become co-pilots. This....might be the start of that au.
> 
> Also: this disregards tie-in canon, it hasn't been beta read so if you spot any egregious errors please let me know, and it's a fill for my pre-canon jaegercon bingo square.

Mako meets Chuck Hansen a month and a half after the paperwork goes through and Sensei's legally adopted her. 

It didn't change much between them, but it's nice to know she belongs to someone again, officially. She thinks it's good for Sensei to belong to something outside the jaegers and PPDC. Mako wants to belong to a jaeger almost more than anything, and that means belonging to the PPDC (which is full of people she admires and a few people she likes very much), but she's sure that isn't enough for a person, not really. So the adoption, even with all the paperwork and frustrated phone calls between agencies in different countries, it's good. 

Mako's pleased when the representative of the Sydney Shatterdome calls her Sensei's little girl on the helicopter pad even though he's talking over her like she isn't right there and fluent enough to English to understand him. Sensei's taken her to a few other shatterdomes since Onibaba. She likes seeing the different jaegers, humbled by their size, curious about how they work, wildly jealoushopeful _awed_ by their pilots. This is the second time she's visited the site of the Australian shatterdome and it's amazing how much has been built in the past few months. Last time, there had been a mostly completed bay for one of the future jaegers and not much else, just plans Sensei and the Australian Ranger, Hansen-san, spent hours going over with foremen and a few people she recognized from PPDC vidconference calls. She'd wandered off to the almost-finished bay where they were starting to build Australia's first jaeger and spent hours watching the welders put together a piece of the unnamed jaeger's torso. 

After they settle into the first completed block of shatterdome living quarters they'll be staying in for the next eight weeks or so (Mako's sure it'll be longer than that, things like this always take forever) and she's dutifully greeted Ranger Hansen, Mako excuses herself to head over to K-Science. Her favorite scientist from  
Anchorage relocated to Sydney three months ago and she wants to see Newt and collect her high five and his stories about MIT and what he's leaned about the kaiju. Newt sends her off after a few minutes because she keeps looking at the clock and already asked five questions about the new jaeger. 

"Dude, go check out Bay 1, the jaeger is like half done and pretty sweet, no paint job or pilots yet, but what's there is awesome. I'll be hanging out, we can hang once you've had a jaeger fix, you're here for like a month, yeah? We'll work on my Japanese, I'll give you the next season of Sailor Moon, it'll be fun." Newt waves her off with a hand covered in something gross and Mako beams at him and with a wave and a cheery "Ja ne!" she jogs towards the main part of the Shatterdome. 

There's still some construction going on, but for the most part, things seem to be wrapping up in the science wing. She gets turned around once, but someone points her in direction of where LOCCENT will be and from there she finds her way to the newest jaeger. Mako runs up the metal stairs to the new jaeger's first observation deck, three stories up and still only around its knees. Well, where the knees will be once they're done. She's surprised to see so much of the torso done, the space for the Conn-Pod conspicuous in its absence. She knows jaegers aren't actually made in order from the ground up, that was bad management of time and resources. But it was odd to see a mostly-complete jaeger torso suspended from _enormous_ chains while workers were doing...something...with the left arm and what looks like a completed leg stood to the side waiting to be attached. She picks a good out-of-the-way spot to sit, legs hanging over the edge of the platform so she can lean over the lowest bar of the railing. She settles in to watch the new jaeger come to life. 

"Who're you?" a boy's voice demands arrogantly. "This is my spot to watch, move it." 

Mako turns enough to shoot him a glare. He's about her age, skinny with blonde hair and an accent as thick as Ranger Hansen's. Mako tells him, "No, I was here first and you can't make me move." 

"It's my spot," he says again, stomping his foot. "I always sit here to watch them work on him-" 

"Not always," Mako said. "Since I took it. You can sit there," she pointed to an almost-as-good spot a few feet closer to a railing corner. It was better lit, but it was harder to see what they were doing on the far side of the jaeger's left arm. 

He glares at her and then says "Nah, I'm going to sit here," and then sits so close he's almost on top of her. 

"Fine," Mako says and decides to ignore him. Pushy boys weren't worth paying attention to, not when there was a jaeger so close. She memorized the stats of this jaeger months ago and she sees the strength being built into his limbs and can imagine the updated plasma canon and new missile system. This jaeger will be amazing, she knows it. Something nudges her arm and Mako looks at the boy. He isn't looking at her and she's going to write it off as fidgeting until he scoots a little closer. Mako frowns and huffs, looking back to the bay floor to follow a woman driving a forklift as she slowly get closer to where several people are doing something with wiring the completed jaeger leg. The boy scoots closer and Mako almost moves over to regain her personal space, then she realizes just in time that's what he wants. 

"You are not getting my spot like that," she says slowly. 

"It's my spot," he insists. Then he tries to shove her over. 

She elbows him and he pushes back and the next thing she knows, she's in a reverse arm wrestling contest with him, their arms lined up and both pushing the other with everything. Mako reaches for railing on his side to get some extra leverage because he's smaller than her but stronger. She's not going to give up her spot. He kicks out and manages to hit her shin and it hurts, so he gets a pointy elbow to the face. 

"Move!" he whisper-shouts. 

"No, you move!" she says with another shove, regaining the centimeters she lost to him. 

"No you!" he shouts, hitting her with his shoulder. He's off-balance enough that she can force him back a little, which isn't as good as moving him over but it'll do for now. 

"Stop!" she says loudly, "Just move over, we can share the spot!" 

"I'm not gonna move, you move you stupid cow!" 

Mako doesn't both with a shove, she just punches him in his stupid mouth. 

"I was here first and I'm not moving!" she yells and that's when Sensei and Hansen-san show up.

***

Herc looks out the window of office Pentecost's taken over for this visit to make sure the kids are still sitting quietly and not trying to kill each other. "That really wasn't the impression I was hoping Chuck'd make," he says ruefully. 

"Mako's usually much better behaved," Pentecost says. "I'm so sorry she punched Chuck, that was uncalled for." 

"Eh, the kid deserved it by all accounts," Herc says. "I want to say he's got better manners, but..." 

"I've met him," Pentecost says with a small smile. "He's not a bad kid, just rough around the edges, right?" 

"Yeah," Herc says, not terribly surprised the Marshall is quoting him to himself. Chuck's been a handful since day one. He was a little shit in Anchorage when Herc was training to pilot Echo Saber, and he got on as many people's nerves in the Tokyo Shatterdome as he charmed. "He's too damn smart and stubborn, too. I'll get him to apologize to Mako and hopefully they'll move past it." 

"Doubtful," Pentecost says. He usually looks serious, but whenever he talks about Mako, Pentecost's extra earnest and this is no exception. "She can take things to heart, especially when it comes to jaegers. She'll be mad at him about that for awhile and embarrassed we caught her fighting." 

"So they're going to be bickering and glaring at each other for the next month then," Herc concludes, already dreading how people are going to complain about Chuck's attitude. If Mako won't let it go, Chuck will just dig in and keep being a jerk to her and everyone else. 

"As long as they get it our of their system _now_ ," Pentecost says. "You realize they'll be the in the same academy class?" 

"...shit, they will," Herc says. "Even if they weren't about the same age, we have to put them in the same class, don't we?" Pentecost nods, and Herc thinks about it for a minute. There's no question that Chuck (and he supposes, Mako) will be pilots someday. And it'll be sooner than later, the kaiju are coming faster and they're bigger and meaner, the PPDC needs good people in jaegers. And the two of them, they're growing up in shatterdomes and by all accounts Mako's something of a genius and Chuck's brighter than people want to give him credit for, they're going to blow through at least half the training. They'll need a challenge, Pentecost might as well put them in together and have one year of hell and blown learning curves instead of one right after the other. 

"Fifty bucks says they're drift-compatible," Herc says with a grin. 

"Fool's bet," Pentecost says dismissively. "The real question is if they'll be able to get along well enough to work as a team." He doesn't look overly thrilled about the prospect of training their kids in a few years. 

Herc claps him on the shoulder and says with a grin, "Just glad you've gotta teach 'em how to do that, Marshall." 

"It'll be my greatest accomplishment," Pentecost says dryly.


End file.
